Banned drinker register not returning

The Northern Territory's director of licensing, registration and alcohol strategy says there is no plan to bring back the banned drinker register (BDR).

Michael Brodie says over the weekend drivers licences were scanned for certain alcohol purchases in Alice Springs to curtail antisocial behaviour while the AFL was in town.

He says ID is needed to buy two-litre wine casks and fortified alcohol products but other liquor purchases are not affected.

"We came across a few people who hadn't come to grips with the fact that if they were going to buy certain products they'd need to have their ID with them but most people treated it with a fair degree of good humour and were able to get a hold of a drivers licence or make a decision to buy a different product," he said.

"The computer technology that represents the BDR has been dismantled by government so we can continue to maintain supply controls like this through a thing called the alcohol restrictions monitoring system.

"That's actually the software that underpins this but it would be much more complex to just turn the BDR on because government asked for that to be disabled and that's what's happened."